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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

My biggest critique with OSM and OSM-based maps is that contributing an OSM change has an unknown time delay between "OSM change" and "actual map software updates to have it." I was infuriated to find multiple geography issues in Apple Maps in my area. I went to OSM, and the underlying source has already been corrected. The satellite imagery is correct, but the map layers for navigation and travel are wrong. How long will it take for OSM changes to make it into Apple Maps? No clue.

You can submit corrections for some info (like place details) to Apple and Google and they'll change within 24-48 hours. If you update OSM, however, it'll take you an unknown amount of time. Some iOS apps proudly champion being able to update OSM data monthly -- but that's still huge compared to basically over a weekend.

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The changes make it into the database in more or less real time and there are condensed feeds providing the changes for the last minute, hour, or day.

So the delays are on the data consumer side. A lot of that ends up being QA, because big companies don't want to publish vandalism. Of course, when they accidentally do publish vandalism, their slower update pace becomes a weakness.

Does that happen? One would assume that the slower update pace is just a matter of policy, so with vandalism they would be able to apply fixes much faster.

There was a notable example a few years ago.

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2018/08/30/osm-condemns-vanda...

OSM had the vandalism removed in a couple hours. A few weeks later, the QA mistakenly let the vandalism through and it wasn't corrected until it got quite a lot of attention.

> You can submit corrections for some info (like place details) to Apple and Google and they'll change within 24-48 hours.

Maybe it's because I only infrequently bother to submit corrections to Google Maps, but that certainly wasn't my experience – a number of changes all took weeks to months to resolve and sometimes required multiple attempts on top.

> How long will it take for OSM changes to make it into Apple Maps?

Never, I think. Apple Maps doesn't import from OSM.

Also you're pretty lucky if your suggestions to Google or Apple are taken into account quickly. Most times they can linger for months or even years, and even get randomly refused or ignored. At least in OSM you can fix the map directly.

Apple uses OSM in certain areas. I believe there’s one European country where Apple’s sole datasource is OSM.

Apple has been fairly quick to run updates in my experience–usually I get a response within a week.

Apple has an active team editing OpenStreetMap and their maps use OSM data in many countries. I see them making edits in my country regularly (they tag changesets with “#adt” so they’re quite visible). More info on the OSM wiki and their GitHub repo:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple

https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

That sounds like your problem is with Apple, not OSM.

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